1. Technical Field
Various embodiments of the present invention relate to electronic circuitry, and more specifically, to tools for analyzing the interconnection between electronic circuitry components.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic circuitry consists primarily of elements and connections between elements. There is often a need to understand how a particular circuit operates based on observation of the circuit itself. This may be done by having engineers trace the various circuitry connections one by one, and organize the components based on their connections. The engineers may arrive at a plausible organization of the entire circuit in a reasonable amount of time for circuits that are simple with a relatively small number of components and connections. However, as the number of elements and connections grows, this traditional method becomes increasingly difficult to use. A modest digital circuit may contain tens of thousands of components, and at least as many connections between them. Some modern circuitry assemblies may have many hundreds of thousands of elements, and a comparable number of connections between the elements. Tracing connections one-by-one is not practical in these cases. It would take far too much time to understand anything more than a trivial circuit using this inefficient conventional approach.
Conventional schematic editor tools are available on the market such as Cadence's Virtuoso Schematic Editor. However, the conventional schematic editor tools are quite limited in their ability to categorize, manipulate and display circuitry components. What is needed is an improved system for organizing and displaying unorganized circuitry components.